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Ben Gallaher, Nashville country music artist and Pennsylvania native, is taking his Country Music with an Edge performance on a Barbed Tour into four Pennsylvania Correctional Institutions during the holiday season. Gallaher will visit and perform at Camp Hill Correctional Institution, the largest in the state, Chester, Somerset, and Fayette, near Pittsburgh.

“Johnny Cash is one of my music heroes, and certainly one of the first songs people recognize him for is Folsom Prison Blues. It has universal appeal. Although Cash wrote the song in 1953 about the infamous Folsom Prison in California, the response from inmates around the country prompted him to do a prison tour,” said Gallaher.

Gallaher will visit and perform at four correctional institutions during his winter break from Belmont University: Camp Hill Correctional Institution, the largest in the state, Chester, Somerset, and Fayette, near Pittsburgh. The twenty-year-old performed two shows last Christmas at Camp Hill's Correctional Institution, and the administration said it was so well received that they've invited him back and also spread the word to other correctional facilities.

“When you visit behind the walls and barbed wire, it's a world few of us can imagine. This is a small way I can share the power of country music with people who might never see me play live or ever hear my album,” says the Pennsylvania native. What's on his set list? “Folsom Prison Blues is obviously a hit, but so is Red, White, and Blue, Tennessee Whiskey, Last Train, and The Good in Goodbye.”

Gallaher, a junior at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, majors in entertainment industry studies and performs weekly. In September, he won Snagajob's Hourly Gig Contest, a national talent contest, and was chosen among 600 entrants to open for country music star Brantley Gilbert in Richmond, Virginia. “I come from a small town in Pennsylvania and write songs that tell stories about hard-working, America-loving people.”

An Eagle Scout, Gallaher received the Arpeggio Award in July from PECAN, Inc., a Pennsylvania-based non-profit for youth in music and the arts, recognizing him as “a celebrity who is a good mentor and sets a good example helping youth to create harmony in their lives through the arts.” Scheduled around his Barbed Tour will be two performances at Buck Wild's Rode House in Mechanicsburg on December 7 and 29.